Live Monitoring of Earth Surface (LiMES): A framework for monitoring environmental changes from Earth Observations

This paper presents the Live Monitoring of Earth Surface (LiMES) framework that helps to automate image processing tasks in transforming raw data into information and knowledge through workflows using interoperable processing service chains for monitoring environmental changes. Both benefits and limitations are demonstrated and discussed through the implementation of a prototype to facilitate the update on the status of some of the 278 UNEP Environmental Hotspots. We believe that such a framework can help to reduce the gap between massive volumes of EO data and the users such as International Organizations (IO) in order to help them better fulfil their environmental monitoring mandates by bringing raw data to a level which can be used by non-remote sensing experts for basic impacts assessments.